RELIGION L Ingalls, like Omar, believed that no man ever pierced the secret,- that no man ever drew aside the veil of fate. With Taine, he was of the opinion "that primitive religions are born at the awakening of human reason, during the richest blossoming of human imagination, at a time of the fairest artlessness and the greatest credulity, that whatever develops credulity side by side with a poetical conception of the world engenders religion". To the bold and independent intellect of Ingalls these principles appealed. The origin of religions and the development of deities, as stated by Renan, appeared reasonable to Ingalls. He did not, however, accept fully the views of these brilliant Frenchmen. To him the fact that the soul was prone to grope in the obscurity veiling the purpose and destiny of man was proof that there was some attribute in his spiritual nature which compelled the birth of primitive religions at the awakening of human reason,- a cause lying behind the unrent veil, an inherent desire for immortality, a profound aspiration. Upon this attribute, dimly discerned, faintly felt, feebly manifested, man reared such rude systems as his environment enabled him to evolve. These conceptions did not carry Ingalls into the hopeless fields of materialism. Beyond the position that our knowledge is not sufficient to warrant any definite determination of the supreme problems of man's existence here he did not go. Standing back in that era of "the awakening of human reason" to which this process carried him, he could see what our progenitors, for want of human experience, could not discern, -the wrecks of numberless systems abandoned along the course over which mankind had taken way. Seeing these, he realized the futility of formulating metaphysical schemes. To sustain his "profound aspiration" to immortality he, like Plato, had recourse to reason. "Inasmuch," he says, "as both force and matter are infinite and indestructible, and can neither be added to nor subtracted from, it follows that in some form we have always existed, and that we shall continue in some form to exist forever." This lacks only the principle of evolution to constitute a basis for endless progress. But this essential he seems to reject. "Evolution, metempsychosis, reincarnation, are not beliefs. They are parts of speech, interesting only to the compiler of lexicons." His strongest terms of disapprobation became a confession to lack of knowledge. He did not deny nor condemn,- his position forbade that. He did not know. Beyond that he could never go. "Whence we came into this life no one knows," he exclaims. Perhaps the most definite and confident utterance of Ingalls on this point is to be found in his oration delivered in the Senate on the death of Senator Hill, of Georgia. He was then at the zenith of his intellectual power, and what he said in that period of his life must be regarded as his settled conviction: Ben Hill has gone to the undiscovered country. Whether his journey thither was but one step across an imperceptible frontier, or whether an interminable ocean, black, unfluctuating, and voiceless, stretches between these earthly coasts and those invisible shores we do not know. |